Articles

OUTSIDE Magazine
"Dial Bike Law"

Hit by a cab? Felled by a pothole? Call an L.A. lawyer. A concussion probably wouldn't help Joel Hyatt much, but the one Gary Brustin suffered gives him credibility. "I know what it's like to be hit, so I'm a little more knowledgeable about bicycle accidents," says Brustin, a survivor of two bike-car collisions and a member of a small but growing Los Angeles set: lawyers who devote their practices almost exclusively to bicycle cases.

It's tempting to dismiss this phenomenon as ambulance chasing or the latest in California excess (especially when a local triathlon magazine runs a lawyer's ad alongside one for the institute of Psychostructural Balancing). But case histories do lend some credence to these folks.

Take Brustin. Last year, he represented a university student who nearly collided with a car that had run a stop sign. The cyclist avoided the vehicle by yanking his front brake, a move that sent him flying over the handlebars; he suffered severe kidney damage. Some lawyers, claims Brustin, would have accepted the police report-it blamed the accident on rider panic-but "police officers go out of their way to put cyclists at fault." So Brustin made speed and distance calculations that proved the car would have hit the biker if he hadn't braked. The drivers insurance company reviewed Brustin's math and offered his client a cash settlement.

Brustin is now acting as associate counsel on an even grimmer case. The suit is against the city of Riverside over an intersection where a highway crosses over a set of railroad tracks at a 45-degree angle. To be safe, cyclists should cross any tracks at a 90-degree angle, but to do so at this intersection, they must ride in the middle of the road. In 1987, a woman pedaling over the tracks was struck and killed by a car. Brustin interviewed local bike repairmen about the intersection. They told him that it routinely damaged bikes and that another cyclist had died at the same spot a year earlier.

The cycling boom is partly responsible for an increase in accidents. Less experienced riders have a way of misreading traffic-and swelling the client pool for the lawyers. As cyclist-attorney Bill Harris puts it, "People who ride a bike like they're driving a car get in trouble."

The majority of cases involve a right-turn cut off, where a driver turns in front of the cyclist without looking. Harris and Brustin have also sued over gaping sewer grates, carelessly opened car doors, and unleashed dogs that bite spinning spokes. In California, such accidents can mean a six-figure settlement for the cyclist.

The lawyer, of course, gets 33 percent.

-Rob Story